1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of nanoparticles and nanotechnology, fabrication of nanotechnology, fabrication of patterned and ordered nanotechnology and devices, and fabrication of nanotubes from the ordered nanoparticles. The invention also relates to the field of fabrication of electronic, electrical and photonic devices using nanotechnology.
2. Background of the Art
Nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology giving thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter through the manipulation of individual atoms. The term has been used to refer to any attempt to work at the submicron scale, but this site mainly covers the subset usually called molecular nanotechnology. Broadly speaking, the central thesis of nanotechnology is that almost any chemically stable structure can be built by building from extremely small size (nanosize) building blocks.
Presently, manufacturers manipulate millions and billions of atoms at a time using conventional technologies. Atoms and molecules are shaped into products by pounding, chipping and other large scale mechanical deformation. For example, chips can be made by forming pure silicon substrates and then etching and depositing patterns of atoms and molecules on its surface. These techniques depend on large scale manipulation of atomic and molecular materials. Manipulating atoms today is still too high an order of complexity for existing mass production techniques. The quality of the control of the deposition of atomic materials requires the sacrifice of manufacturing speeds to assure deposition of atomic materials requires the sacrifice of manufacturing speeds to assure quality replication of intended designs. In the future, molecular nanotechnology will require more sophisticated yet high speed control over the placement of individual atoms.
Often, nanotechnology is referred to as “bottom-up” manufacturing. It aims to start with the smallest possible controllable building materials, atoms, and use them to create a desired product. Working with individual atoms and individual molecules allows an approximately atom-by-atom or molecule by molecule design of structures.
An ultimate objective of nanotechnology is to get essentially every atom in the right place, make almost any type of material structure that is consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, and to have manufacturing costs that do not greatly exceed the cost of the required raw materials and energy.
Wilson Ho, Hyojune Lee, “Single bond formation and characterization with a scanning tunneling microscope,” Science 286(26 Nov. 1999): 1719-1722; http://www.physics.uci.edu/˜wilsonho/stm-iets.html describes the use of Atomic Force Microscopes for changing physical properties on surfaces.
To get every atom in the right place, it is necessary to develop techniques, processes, protocols and machines, often termed assemblers, that can force site-specific chemical reactions or atomic/molecular placement or materials. To find structures consistent with the laws of chemistry and physics, molecular modeling software will be used.
A self replicating assembler would work by using its ability to make site-specific chemical reactions to make copies of itself. These copies can then make copies of themselves also, and so on. Eventually, the assembler multitude can then work in parallel to build molecular structures. This has been referred to as genetic manufacturing since it assumes oriented duplication as occurs in biological operation of genetics. This massive parallelism would lead to great economies of scale, but it is still necessary to create the first self-replicating structure by an non-replication process and assembler. These assemblers can be compared to the molecular machinery evident in cells today.
Nanotechnology has not yet been developed on a commercial scale, but molecular models of possible nanomachines are becoming increasingly common. Often, these models analyze the basic tools necessary for a nanotechnological part or component that could go into tools such as an assembler.